IBM is laying off 310 employees within the technology company's Seterus mortgage servicing division in Durham, North Carolina, according to a WRAL new report.IBM CEO Ginni RomettyThe imminent job cuts, scheduled for March 2019, come just as IBM sells Seterus to Mr. Cooper Group for an undisclosed sum. ChannelE2E has not independently confirmed the staff cuts.IBM has had targeted layoffs in 2018, 2017 and 2016, though the technology company typically does not announce or comment about the cuts to the media. CEO Ginni Rometty's strategy has been to continually "rebalance" the company's workforce -- away from legacy skills and toward strategic growth opportunities like cognitive computing, cloud services security.
Although IBM's overall revenues have stabilized in the past year or so, the company's cloud and cognitive computing revenues generally have not kept pace with Wall Street's expectations. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both larger and growing more rapidly than IBM's cloud business. (See the top public cloud service providers.) As a result, IBM is paying a lofty $34 billion to acquire Red Hat -- which has a big installed base both on-premises and in multiple public clouds.IBM is expected to announce quarterly results on January 22, 2019, according to the company's investor relations calendar. And the Red Hat buyout is expected to close in the second half of 2019. The company has also been shedding non-strategic assets. In addition to selling Seterus, the company recently sold its legacy Lotus Notes, Domino and Tivoli software businesses to HCL for $1.8 billion.
Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.
